


Future Days

by mautadite



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Coda, F/F, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:33:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24843091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mautadite/pseuds/mautadite
Summary: Dina’s sitting out on the porch late one evening, watching the moonlight play across the washed-out boards of the fence facing her, when Ellie shuffles into view.
Relationships: Dina/Ellie (The Last of Us)
Comments: 67
Kudos: 694





	Future Days

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the end _The Last of Us II_. Had to get this out of my system. I want to believe that eventually, they’ll be okay.

After the first month, Jesse’s father and a few of the other old timers had helped her build a little porch. Small, simple, with an old rocking chair Maria gave her, just enough cover to keep off the sun when it’s hot. She’s got a couple of bird-feeders hanging down from the edges. JJ loves sitting perched on her lap looking up at them as they flit around, squabbling over the grain, chirping and singing one to one. He babbles up at them like nobody’s business. One of these days he’s going to say something approaching a word, and her heart lurches every time he almost does, not wanting to miss a single moment of it.

Dina is sitting out on the porch late one evening, watching the moonlight play across the washed-out boards of the fence facing her, when Ellie shuffles into view.

She sits up straight. All her fingers go numb, and for a moment there’s nothing but white noise in her mind, the sound of rushing water and the click of a closing door. Dina can’t move. In her nightmares, Ellie is hollow and raw and bloody, joining the ghosts of Talia and Jesse and Joel. To see her now, like this, haggard and drawn but so impossibly real and whole, is like a blow to the fucking knees.

She stares.

Ellie draws closer. When she sees Dina, her footsteps halt, kicking up a small cloud of dust. A few pebbles rocket across the yard, coming to a stop just in front of the porch. Ellie’s eyes are on her, but she’s yet too far away for Dina to quite make out what’s in them. She squeezes her own eyes shut. It feels like there’s broken glass in her chest, and it’s all slowly trying to squeeze its way out.

A moment passes before Ellie starts walking again. Dina keeps her eyes closed, listening to the sounds of her body approaching. Ellie’s alive. Ellie’s here. Ellie’s _back_. Behind her lids, her eyes begin to sting.

The footsteps thump softly up the stairs. Dina hears when Ellie shrugs off her pack, and slides to a seat next to the rocking chair. Her head bumps against the wall. They sit like that for several moments, neither speaking.

When Dina opens her eyes and finally looks down at her, tears are streaming down her face. She looks at Ellie through a film of bitter salt, the past few months making tracks down her face alongside the water. Ellie is thinner than ever, veins showing up blue-green along her forearms. Her hair is still cut short, jagged in a way that suggests she’s been hacking away at it herself. A glance at her pack and her legs confirms what Dina had seen from afar; she doesn’t have her side-arms and long-guns at the ready. Her knees are pulled up to her chest, her arms perched across them. Dina hears herself sob when she spots Ellie’s hands. She doesn’t know if it’s the missing fingers or the new bite mark or her charm around Ellie’s wrist that does it.

Ellie’s crying too, now, just barely. She does it silently, the tears balancing in her eyes, her breaths deep and measured, while she looks up at the moon.

“Maria told me,” she finally speaks, voice hoarse, “that you were staying in my old house. Guess I didn’t really believe it until I saw it.”

Dina’s next breath is shaky. Her laughter has no teeth and no humour behind it.

“Yeah, well. Jesse’s place was too, you know. And you remember we told Astrid she could have mine.”

Ellie nods, gaze still skyward. “Yeah. I remember.”

Dina picks at some lint on her jeans, uses her sleeves to wipe her face. It hadn’t been a hard decision, to stay here with JJ. Familiar, but not too much so. She and Ellie had never lived here together. This house reminds her of Ellie without the aching emptiness that the farm made her feel. The first night she’d lain sleeplessly in bed, one hand playing with a tuft of JJ’s hair, the other gripping one of the photos of the three of them that she’d slipped out of the frame. Dina knows that picture by heart now, as she does her own face, sketched in dark pencil by Ellie’s hand.

She clears her throat.

“So. You saw Maria already?”

“Yeah.” Ellie scuffs the heel of her boot against the boards. “Pretty much right as I came through the gates.”

It sounds like there’s a world contained in those words. 

“Shouldn’t you be out celebrating with Tommy?” Without meaning to, her voice comes out harder. It’s what comes of putting Joel’s brother’s name in her mouth. As much as she understands him, her resentment flowers across her ribcage, a thing that would populate her entire body if she let it. Dina doesn’t see much of him these days. And from what she hears, since he’s been pulled off patrols, Tommy doesn’t see much of anything other than the inside of a bottle.

Ellie barely reacts; just drags her boot along the floor again.

“I, ah. I spoke to Tommy already.” Ellie’s throat bobs as she swallows. “It was a short conversation. Might be the last one we ever have, if what he says holds.”

Dina sifts through the words, trying to find what Ellie’s really saying. After a few seconds, she has a few possibilities, but she finds that she doesn’t want to ask for clarification. Does she need to? All those months ago, Ellie had chosen Abby, and the fact of that remains as bitter poison on Dina’s tongue, no matter what’s become of Abby now.

The quiet overtakes them again. Dina joins Ellie in watching the moon, large and luminous.

“Where is he?” The question is small, fragile; asking for the right to be asked and answered. Dina chews over her reply for a few seconds before sighing.

“Inside. I laid him down a little while ago.”

She glances down in time to see a slight twitch in all of Ellie’s remaining fingers. A short, reflexive movement, another little question of sorts. Dina remembers what those hands looked like holding their son; unsure at first, but eventually with all this quiet strength and love and protection.

“Is he… is he sleeping through the night yet?”

Dina shakes her head.

“Not yet. Still gets fussy at a certain hour.”

Most nights, he wakes her with his crying. Some nights, she wakes him with hers. 

Ellie is worrying at her thumbnail. Dina can’t take her eyes off the two stumps. She’s seen wounds like that before, and she can tell that it hadn’t been a clean break. 

“Jesus fucking Christ, Ellie,” she chokes. All of a sudden, it’s all too much for her. Ellie leaving and Ellie coming back; they seem to hurt like the same sort of arrow.

Ellie thumps her head back against the wall, looking up at her. Her eyes are still wet. When she gets to her feet, she does it slowly, aging with every movement.

“If…” Ellie trails off. Clears her throat. Standing there, she looks almost like a skeleton. “If you want me to leave, all you have –”

Dina rockets to her feet.

“No, you know what, fuck you Ellie!” She slams her fist furiously against Ellie’s chest, the words coming out in a whisper that wants to be a scream. Ellie stumbles back a step, but doesn’t make a move to stop her. “ _Fuck_ you! _Now_ you care what I want?”

Ellie breathes in shakily. “Dina…”

“No!” she says, not even knowing what she’s saying it to. She reaches out again, but this time it’s to grab Ellie by the shirt and pull her into an embrace. “God _damn_ it, Ellie!”

Her arms go about Ellie’s waist, her face buries into her neck. She smells like sweat and dust, long journeys with no endings. Pressed up against her, Dina can feel that she’s even thinner than she looks, and that wasting, that lack, it makes her mould herself even harder to Ellie, wanting to share some of her mass. Ellie’s hands rest on her hips with butterfly softness and care, returning the hug, and Dina is weak with how good her hands feel on her.

“You’ve lost weight,” Ellie murmurs. Dina scoffs into her neck.

“Yeah, no shit,” she mumbles back, and brings up a hand to trace Ellie’s own bony collarbone. 

Dina holds her for long minutes, taking in her scent, the feel of her body, the tattoo of her heartbeat beneath her clothes. Ellie doesn’t move, doesn’t stop their embrace. The stillness of it is unsettling somehow, alien to the girl she knows who is always on the move. Dina’s breathing calms as the moments go by, and not for anything in the world – not her fury, not her fear, not her pain – will she let Ellie go.

Ellie sighs. Dina feels the puff of hot air, the way it makes the curls on her neck shift and flutter.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she says, in the smallest voice in the world. 

Making her movements slow and restrained, Dina pulls away by a fraction. She keeps one hand on Ellie’s waist, and uses the other to cup her cheek and look into her eyes.

“You didn’t, Ellie,” she says seriously. Her voice is thick. “I need you to understand that you didn’t. You left. I lost _you_.”

Ellie tries to stop it, but Dina can see her face crumbling by inches, with all those ghosts in her eyes.

“No, Dina, I swear, I swear to you, you didn’t lose me. I thought about you two every day, I fucking swear…”

Dina touches her mouth gently. “I never said that you didn’t love me. Or JJ.” She twists her lips wryly. “I don’t think I ever really doubted that.”

Ellie presses her lips together, still trying to hold back her tears. She nods. “Good. Good.”

“I wish I had said it too,” Dina confesses. It’s been eating her raw, a recurring scene in her nightmares. “That night. All these months, I kept thinking, if only I had just said “I love you too.” Maybe you would have stayed.”

Ellie’s face folds, and she brings Dina in hard, tips her chin and kisses her. Her mouth tastes stale, her lips are chapped and dry, their teeth knock against each other like they’re fucking thirteen, but Dina doesn’t stop it; she leans into it. All this time, she’s tried not to remember what this felt like, the better to not be haunted day by day by Ellie’s spectre, by their love. Kissing her again is like being burst apart from the inside out, seeing herself and all her parts. She buries a hand into Ellie’s cropped hair as they kiss, starving the ghosts between them of air.

There’s a new scar on Ellie’s chin; Dina kisses it when they pull away. Then her cheek, her forehead, her nose, the old cut on her eyebrow. Ellie closes her eyes and breathes, all while Dina makes a pathway of kisses to her neck and sternum, then feels for her left hand to bring that up to her lips too. She pulls each digit individually to her mouth; thumb, index, middle. She doesn’t hesitate to do the same with the stumps, gentling her touch by a few degrees further. Close up, they’re even more gruesome, and after bestowing her kisses, Dina meets Ellie’s eyes sadly, feeling the weight of the moon on their shoulders.

“Oh, Ellie,” she says. She cups her cheek again. “You were right, you know. You really are going to kill me.”

Swallowing, Ellie blinks back new tears.

“I don’t want that,” she says fiercely. “I want to love you both for every second I have left.”

Dina smiles weakly for the first time tonight, finding comfort in the familiarity like she’d found comfort in the bones of this old house. Ellie, as always, is ready to fight.

Inside, there’s a soft cry. After a beat, there comes another, closer to a wail.

Dina looks over her shoulder to the door. Back at Ellie, whose eyes are locked on the house, and the sounds coming from within. She draws a deep breath, and pulls away. Steps back a few feet. Wipes at her eyes, fixes her hair. Looks back at the woman who hurt her, the woman she loves best in all the world.

Holds out her hand.

“Come on,” she says softly. She crooks a finger. “Let’s go get him back to sleep.”

Ellie blinks rapidly, nodding her head. 

“I… yeah, I mean. Yeah. Let’s.”

She extends her left hand to take Dina’s. Dina squeezes softly, mindful of the scars, and opens the door to lead her inside.


End file.
